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automotive

Southeast Toyota Drives Corolla On Tumblr

Southeast Toyota Distributors, the privately owned distributor for Toyota's southeastern region, has launched a huge digital centric campaign that is also the first major auto campaign
on Tumblr executed at the tier two, or regional, level. The effort, "Unexpect Everything," touts the 2014 Corolla with some 300 pieces of unique content on a Tumblr page, UnexpectEverything.com, and
support via digital banner ads, Facebook posts, tweets, and other elements.

The campaign, via Southeast Toyota AOR Atlanta-based 22squared, includes a partnership with YouTube
influencer sWooZie, digital experience developers John Brence/Ogeeku and musician Tyler Ward to create custom video content, which includes a virtual reality video arcade game
called CorollaCade where players virtually drive a Corolla through a southern urban landscape. The game, living on sWooZie’s channel, lets participants control the Corolla and learn about
its features by doing things like picking up virtual passengers, parallel parking and maneuvering obstacles.

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The campaign also pulls in bloggers and social media mavens
— some 15 influencers across Southeast Toyota’s five-state footprint — who will to drive 2014 Corollas around for a week, documenting their experiences within their areas of interest
on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine and Tumblr channels. Photographer Jack Parker will also contribute content.

With the Tumblr site
as the hub, all of the content for Unexpect Everything is organized by dynamic, social media-driven tiles on the site’s splash page.

Laura Bosek, management
supervisor at 22Squared, tells Marketing Daily that the nature of campaign content reflects the audience's media consumption. "Much of it is in small snippets, which is how Millennials like to
consume media." She says the 15 influencers, for example, will do much of their video content on platforms like Vine and Instagram. She adds that KPI's will include metrics around traffic to Toyota's
research and vehicle configuration platforms. "Awareness and engagement are two critical measurements."

Julie Tullis, marketing communications manager at Southeast Toyota,
tells Marketing Daily that the program, which runs October to the end of November followed by TV ads in January, includes Starbucks wifi takeover, where Corolla content and branding adorns the
in-cafe wireless login page. "The thinking was to have a lot of custom content and high distribution, so it's very social with Tumblr housing the content." She says the southeast region’s social
channels get a lot of traffic. “We have about 365,000 fans on Facebook, so we are activating fans there and driving them to Tumblr as well." She says the effort includes promoted Tweets talking
about the car and the program, and that the campaign includes a separate Hispanic-market campaign via the Miami office of MGSComm.

Bosek says the campaign is a first in many
ways, "Not just in terms of digital; we have done specific heavy digital campaigns in the past, but the content creation piece makes it stand alone." Tullis says the scope of the effort reflects the
importance of the car to the southeast, as well as the importance of the region to Toyota Motor Sales. "Camry and Corolla are our largest selling vehicles," she says, "and the southeast is the largest
[U.S.] sales region." The region constitutes 20% of Toyota's national sales.